"Don't let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do." - John Wooden (1910-2010) I hope his reunion with his beloved Nell is sweet.

I'll start today's post by sharing this picture of Willyne and I with Koby Stevens taken just after his baptism today.  I really enjoyed his enthusiasm, and the spirit he demonstrated when his Primary teacher, Gaye Lynne Wiser, spoke and when she directed questions at him.  I was thankful to have been able to share that experience with him!

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As you probably know, John Wooden died last night.  There were two people who really influenced me over my lifetime that have died in the last couple years that I really hoped would make it to age 100.  President Gordon B. Hinckley of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints made it to age 97, and John Wooden made it to age 99.  There will be countless things written about John Wooden in the next few days.  No one of us can capture him completely in the written word, so I'd encourage you to Google him and spend a memorable hour or more getting to know him better by looking at several of the great links there.  I'm simply going to attempt to describe what he meant to me personally.


He was truly a one-of-a-kind man, who deeply touched the lives of an amazingly diverse group of people.  Many referred to him simply as "Coach" or "Teacher", titles he was much more comfortable with then any other.  Ron Flade, a friend of mine from another lifetime (the one where Coach unknowingly touched us as children in the early 1960s before Alcindor (Kareem was Alcindor when he came to LA) or Walton came to town) put it well earlier today with a comment and a Wooden quote, "The world is a lesser place with the passing of John Wooden. 'You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.'"


George Fountain, a friend I came to know and appreciate much later (in the 1990s), and who I have learned much from as I admiringly enjoy his positive attitude as he courageously fights ALS, shared another Coach quote that is so appropriate today, "Don't give up on your dreams, or your dreams will give up on you."

I will challenge the sports fans here by offering my personal opinion that the greatest of his unprecedented ten NCAA basketball championships was the first, in the 1963-64 season.  I was 10 years old, but I still remember how excited all of us in the shadows of UCLA on LA's Westside were when Coach led the underdog Bruins to do the impossible (hence my Wooden quote as the title of this post). 

How impossible, you ask?  Well, Coach had been perhaps the ultimate passionate and patient tortoise up to this point at UCLA.  He had already been there well over a decade, and had put together a respectible winning record by teaching his mostly ordinary student-athletes to give unusually diligent attention to the fundamentals.  He was more interested in building character that anything (which I'm certain is the true reason people still care so deeply about this man 35 years after he retired from coaching, while never retiring from continuing to care about the character of everyone he had ever taught.).  He was also insistent on conditioning, teamwork, shooting drills -- like I said, the fundamentals.

He had put together that respectible winning record, but no national championships or anything other coaches hadn't accomplished.  But he patiently built his program, attracting better and better athletes and honing his skills at teaching the vital importance of the basics.

Which brings us to the national championship game at the end of the 1963-64 season.  His team came to that game with an amazing 29-0 won-loss record, but still were total underdogs in the final game against mighty Duke.  Duke was literally head and shoulders bigger and better than UCLA in every aspect of the game you could measure, and if the game had been played on a computer, I'm sure the computer would have given the game to Duke in a heartbeat.  But that's why they play the games on the hardwood, not on a computer.  UCLA played such tough defense that they frustrated Duke into turnover after turnover.  The Bruins were physically conditioned so well that they could do fast breaks up the court time after time following those turnovers.  At one point in the first half, the Bruins went on a 14-0 run in less than 3 minutes to force the game wide open -- simply with this tough defense, forcing turnovers, and taking advantage of their opponents errors with perfect teamwork and fast breaks.

All you Harry Potter fans out there, I suggest with great repect to Harry that you study this game which earned Coach the title "The Wizard of Westwood".  Study his life while you are at it.  Be sure to notice his humility, as illustrated many times including this amazing quote, "Wooden disliked the Wizard of Westwood nickname, preferring to be called coach.'I’m no wizard, and I don’t like being thought of in that light at all,” he said in a 2006 interview with the UCLA History Project. “I think of a wizard as being some sort of magician or something, doing something on the sly or something, and I don’t want to be thought of in that way.'”" (click here to see the rest of the Associated Press story this was quoted from, published just before midnight last night MDT)

I believe the first championship was Coach's greatest, even though it was with "only" the Walt Hazzard/Gail Goodrich team, not Kareem or Walton.  The unmatchable 88 game winning streak came later in the twelve year span that began with that 1963-64 championship and included a total of ten national championships.  Ten in twelve years!  But it took all the patience, all the persistence, and all the perfect attention to detail that he demanded from his students to get to the point that his teams could win all those championships.  After they got the first, the pattern was set and they truly were unbeatable by anyone but themselves from then on.

Here's a picture of Wooden taken the night of the tenth and final championship.  He had made the surprise announcement of his retirement only after winning the national semifinal, getting his team to that game.

            AP Photo republished at espn.com -- After his 10th and final NCAA championship --

                  this one over Kentucky on March 31, 1975 -- Wooden wore the spoils of victory.

As I mentioned earlier, you can Google Coach Wooden and come up with many great articles.  Here are two I especially enjoy, maybe because they were written before his death, maybe because they go so well into the depth of his character.  The first is by Rick Reilly, written in 2008 (click on the underline to read it).  Significantly, it dwells as much on the greatness Coach demonstrated after 1975 as it does on his basketball career.  The other, by Jim Murray, published in the Los Angeles Times in 1972, and republished by ESPN on its website today, was written while the amazing basketball feats were still happening.

Wooden coached most of his UCLA games from a facility shared by rival USC, the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena across the city from campus.  After the success was well underway, Pauley Pavilion was built on campus and the team began playing there.  Although I lived less than five miles away, tickets were impossible to come by since they were sold as season tickets literally years in advance, with most being reserved for students.  I followed the team by television, radio, and Jim Murray's descriptive columns in the Times.  I have been to Pauley exactly once in my life -- for my high school graduation of all things.  We had an amazing auditorium on our own campus, complete with balconies and a wonderful stage.  I had been in it many times for everything from listening to US Senator Alan Cranston in person (his son went to school there, which I'm sure helped us get him as a speaker) to seeing people refuse to stand for or say the pledge of allegiance at school assemblies in 1968 (which unbelievably resulted in the pledge being discontinued at our school).  It was always used for graduations, until my class came along, when it was determined to be unsafe from the frequent earthquakes that are part of daily life there.  The auditorium has now been long since razed, but my year it sat empty and we were blessed to graduate at Pauley instead.

What a thrill to walk on the floor of this storied arena.  The actual floor where Coach, Kareem, and the other players walked many times that very year.  Honestly, I was much more interested in the many banners hanging from the rafters for NCAA championships than I was in anything going on in my own graduation ceremony.  It was an amazing thrill to be in the very building that Wooden's persistence and success allowed to be built at all!

Ironically, my most cherished personal Coach Wooden memory was hearing him speak years later in the 1990s, not at Pauley Pavilion, but back at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena.  He was the keynote speaker at an Amway convention, and that alone was enough to get me to go.  My family had moved to Utah by then.  I worked out of a one room office 40 miles away in Upland when I was in town, which was most of the time.  I slept in a variety of places, wherever I could find, basically.  I drove a broken down car, which broke down completely the night Coach was speaking, but if you know me, minor details like having no transportation didn't stop me.  I figured out how to get there on a series of trains and buses, and getting back afterwards was a total miracle.  (If you dare ask, I'll be happy to tell you about it sometime)  Was it worth it?  Absolutely.  If you've read of his "Pyramid of Success" then you know how powerful his message was.  If you haven't, well, get a copy and be ready for some of the best leadership material available anywhere.  I promise I'm not exaggerating.

Thanks for staying with me all the way on this, Coach Wooden really did have a great impact on me and countless other people.  And the only way any of us will ever be able to repay him is to follow his example and do something for someone daily that they can never repay us for.  In my own way, I hope to do just that.  Goodbye for now, Coach.  I do hope you enjoy a sweet reunion with Nell!

I wasn't blogging when President Hinckley died, but sometime soon I'd like to share with you here what he personally meant to me as well.  I will miss both of these men greatly, and try to live up to what I learned from each of them.